Page 62 of Marrying the Savage

“She said she didn’t have one,” he repeats.

“Yes.”

“And naturally, you gave her the most important object in this house.”

“She needed a ring.”

“She needed clothes, food, a doctor, and perhaps several hours in which no one dragged her anywhere. The ring could have waited.”

“No.” The word comes out before I decide to give it.

Mikhail hears that too. Of course he does.

He moves slowly around the table and stops a few feet away. “The men noticed.”

“I expected them to.”

“It barely even fits her,” he says. “Did you use thread?”

The thread was absurd. Black cord wrapped around a ring far too large for Sofia’s hand, tied carefully enough to hold, but not carefully enough to make it look anything other than improvised.

It looked ridiculous. She told me so.

Then she looked at it as if it had hurt her. But in some softer, more dangerous place she had not expected me to find.

That’s the problem with Sofia Antonova. She gives too much away and hides too much badly. Her anger is obvious. Her fear less so. Her loneliness, though—that she tries to bury under jokes, under insults, under the quick flash of teeth she calls humor.

But when I tied my father’s ring to her finger, for one moment she looked young.

Not weak. Young.

As if no one had given her something without turning it into a transaction for so long that she didn’t know what to do with the weight of it.

I shouldn’t have liked that.

I did.

I turn from the window. “Let them notice.”

Mikhail’s mouth tightens. “They will not think you did it because she complained about jewelry.”

“Good.”

“They will think you mean to keep her.”

“I married her.”

“You know what I mean.”

Yes. I do.

A marriage can be strategy. A bride can be leverage. A wedding can be a move on a board already soaked in old blood. Men in our world understand that. They respect it. They may even admire it if the move is cruel enough.

But giving Sofia the Volodin ring is different. That is blood pulled from ashes and tied to the finger of an Antonov woman.

Mikhail doesn’t need to say it.

I hear it anyway.